Today's blessing...

[Mike Vande]

...is pretty simple, maybe some of you won't even think of it as a "blessing" per se, or much of one even if you do, but it meant something to me.

This morning, I stopped at a convenience store to pickup a sandwich for lunch. This store is a very busy place in the mornings. It sits just to one side of what appears to be a zoning border, if that's what you call it, in Johnson County; on one side of the street, there are houses, I'm guessing in the $100K price range(but that is a very uneducated guess), and on the other is where the industrial parks start.

For those of you unaware of the landscape in the Kansas City metro area, Johnson County is one of the wealthiest pieces of geography in the world, or so I'm told. You have to be making pretty big bux to own property there, particularly is you live in it's more southern areas. So, one would think you'd run into rather posh folks, even in the convenience stores.

This particular convenience store appears to be mostly patronized by folks who work in the industrial parks. Those are the folks there in the early morning hours, anyway; a lot of rough-looking dudes in t-shirts, jeans and work boots. Sometimes, you'll see nurses in scrubs, some guys like me in business casual, occassionally someone in a tie, but mostly it's just blue collar-looking men, getting morning coffee and a pastry or a breakfast sandwich, and/or the morning paper.

This morning, I had to get a couple of things that necessitated searching them out among the various items on the shelves. At one point, I had to cross through the cash register line to get to the shelves at the opposite end of the store. I said "Excuse me, may I slip through here?" to a guy with a dirty ball cap and scraggly looking beard, and he acquiesced with a smile, saying "Sure, go ahead." I didn't think about it much right then, as I was still thinking about the sutff I had to get.

After I paid for my stuff, I headed for the door. There was a guy going out the door, far enough ahead that he could have let go of the door without being rude. But he waited, held it open for me, and said "Have a good one".

I thanked him and headed for my car, and it suddenly occured to me that two strangers, with their own day in front of them and things on their minds, had actually taken the time to be nicer than they had to be to someone they didn't know.

Wow.

On the news, we are bombarded by stories of people who are robbing convenience stores like the one I was in this morning, shooting/knifing/beating each other, kidnapping kids, molesting and killing them, stealing babies after slicing them out of the mother's wombs, dying in car wrecks, etc and etc. I think hearing that sort of thing day after day colors our view of the world in a bad way. Most of the time, I really expect people I encounter in passing to be, at best, only minimally aware and mostly unconcerned with me, and occasionally just flat-out mean and rude. I often find myself sort of clenched and guarded around folks I don't know, waiting for whatever unpleasant situation I may find myself having to deal with to erupt from out of nowhere.

This morning, I was treated in a more than civil fashion by two guys who could have been much less courteous than they were, who took time to be nicer than they had to be. It made me, for a moment or two, unclench and relax, and wonder if perhaps people were becoming just a little nicer to each other. It made me feel good, and I thank God for moments like that.